Predation by "Civilized" Humans More Ruthless than Killing in the Wild?

photo: public domainThe worldview of MultiEarth civilization embodies a highly-polarized and confusing attitude toward wildness. On the one hand, it perceives wildness in the natural world as a threat to suppress and defeat; on the other, it intentionally channels a type of wildness when it wages war, produces TV reality shows, and intimidates and tortures other humans through various enforcement and intelligence agencies. MultiEarth civilization, ignoring its own extensive use of primal wildness in violent actions, makes much ado about the wild violence in Nature. Phrases like “red in tooth and claw” and “the law of the jungle” underscore MultiEarth’s jaundiced view that predation and killing are to be expected in the dangerous, brutal Wild. “It’s a jungle out there” is the same kind of phrase about the predatory behavior of people competing against one another. Perhaps we understood the predation in Nature with more balance when we had to kill the meat we ate. Now that most of our meat comes already prepared or in sterile packaging, it’s as if killing never had to happen for us to eat burgers, pulled pork, sushi, or chicken. Rarely does it cross our minds that every plant we eat has to die.

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